


lead me not into temptation

by gracieminabox



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Masturbation, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 14:19:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9445136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracieminabox/pseuds/gracieminabox
Summary: Leonard needs to burn.





	

Novafire, that kid is a pain in the ass.

Leonard wanders into his graduate apartment - _stomps_ is more like it, and he knows he’ll get a nasty comm from the woman who lives below him in the morning - at half past midnight, muttering increasingly vulgar (and increasingly southern) swears under his breath. He drops his medkit and his books on the nearest flat surface, toes off his shoes, and heads to the shower, stripping off his cadet reds en route.

It’s his third shower of the day. He took one this morning as a matter of routine, and a second at the hospital before he left, in the space between his last surgery of the day and meeting Jim for drinks at some shitty off-campus bar that had terrible music but served cheap beer in big glasses so who cared.

He doesn’t _need_ another shower. Except for how he emphatically _does._

As he was saying, that kid is a pain in the ass.

Leonard knew this, really, from the moment his path and Jim Kirk’s crossed two and a half years ago, when Leonard furiously sat down next to Jim and snarled out his personal warning label, nature’s own way of saying Do Not Touch. He distinctly recalls actively trying to put the kid off, not allowing himself to give more than fleeting glances to the blood on his shirt, the bruise on his jaw, the fire burning in his eyes.

Then, _like an asshole_ , Leonard had handed over his flask, and somehow, _without Leonard giving any permission for it at all_ , Jim Kirk and Leonard McCoy became _jimandbones._

He turns the water on as hot as he can stand it, needing his olive skin to blanch when he presses into it later, needing to burn.

Jim is a goddamn puzzle to which Leonard has all the pieces, but he’s an idiot and can’t figure out how to assemble them. He hates that shit, hates wasting his time trying to figure something out that should be so easy, that seems to come so easily to other people. Marriage was the same way. Every victory its own little delight; every failure amplified and infuriating until the inevitable explosion.

Wait. Is he comparing his _whatever the fuck_ with Jim to his marriage?

_Fuck, doesn’t this shower go any hotter?_

When he leans his forearms on the tile of the shower and his head on his forearms and disappears into the cloud of white vapor the steam produces, he wonders what exactly has happened to him, to his life, to everything he thought he knew about himself. The steam’s not thick enough, he notes; not enough to block out the little navy blue bottle of Jim’s shampoo sitting on the ledge of the bathtub; not hot enough to steam the glass door to the shower and create a fog so thick he can’t see the shadow of Jim’s gunmetal gray sonic razor by Leonard’s sink.

The fucking kid doesn’t even _live_ here.

Well. You know. Not according to the Academy records.

Although when Jim last spent the night in his own goddamn dorm is anybody’s guess.

Leonard closes his eyes, thinking that if the steam won’t block the images out, then he’ll do it his own damn self. But when his eyelids slide down, all Leonard sees instead are Jim’s bones that he’s reset, Jim’s bruises that he's healed, Jim’s cuts spilling bright red blood into thick bronze hair that Leonard has smoothed a regen over and made new again.

And casting its own tint over all of those images, Leonard sees fire.

Fire that burns so hot that the flame turns electric blue.

_Jim’s Eyes Blue. Like the name of a crayon Joanna would color with._

Like Leonard said, he needs to _burn._

His eyes open again, and he looks down his body, shooting a murderous glance at his traitorous cock, rising with interest against the backdrop of Jim’s shampoo bottle.

Water scalds Leonard’s back as he muses on juxtaposition, because in a lot of ways, Jim is his own walking, talking contradiction. He is a pugilist and a pacifist and sees no issue with being both. He’ll flirt with and fuck with anything that moves and consents, but a solid half of the injuries Leonard’s patched up have been incurred trying to protect someone from unwanted advances. He never got to be a normal kid, but you’d never have guessed it in a million years, seeing him with Joanna. He is, as Pike has repeatedly called him, a genius-level repeat offender.

He has a way of tossing contradiction into the lives of others around him, too. Because Leonard, who’d like to think of himself as a pretty self-aware man, has never, to his knowledge, been anything but heterosexual.

Except now, when he looks at this bright burning banked _blue_ star that he’s found himself orbiting, this _something_ stirs in Leonard’s solar plexus, wraps itself around the base of his spine, and refuses to be ignored.

Well, that and this erection he’s got going on now, of course.

_And when the fuck did I wrap my hand around it?_

This, too, is _obviously_ Jim’s fault.

He doesn’t want to jerk off thinking about his best friend, the only real true friend he has, _maybe the only real true friend he’s ever had in his entire life, and isn’t that just a fine thing to realize when one’s pushing on his third decade?,_ but he has little choice right now but to acknowledge defeat. Because that goddamn pain-in-the-ass kid in a bloody t-shirt from the shuttle in Riverside is deep in Leonard’s skin and muscles and bones (ha!) and spirit now, irretrievably so, and there’s not a goddamn thing Leonard can do about it.

His hands are getting sloppy, irregular, not nearly so smooth in their strokes. It’s because he’s close and it’s vaguely annoying, and he _misses_ having someone else to touch him so he can just use these moments to let go. He doesn’t miss Jocelyn a good goddamn, her haughtiness and her iciness and that delightful tendency to sleep with Leonard’s best man while her husband was up to his elbows in somebody’s chest cavity; but he definitely misses sex. And it’s not like he hasn’t been propositioned, he has, but the few and far between kisses he’s gotten since he moved to San Francisco haven’t done anything for him. They haven’t made Leonard want to devour the other party’s lips like an illicit substance, intoxicating and heady. They haven’t made him want to get lost inside someone.

Because he already is.

Leonard is burning, and the flame is Jim’s Eyes Blue, and _Christ_ he’s coming with a shout, heavy and pained, some syllable that starts with “J” but that Leonard never allows to finish echoing off the tile.

He comes back to himself a moment later, watching stripes of white run off the tile and spiral down the drain, the now-tepid water sluicing down his neck, grazing his thudding carotid pulse.

“Fuck,” he says aloud as he shuts off the tap and steps out of the shower stall. Because that’s what he is. Leonard is completely, one hundred percent fucked.

His best, closest, _only_ true friend in the entire world took him from a broken, drunken, snarling shell of a man and turned him back into a human being, and in return, Leonard had the audacity to go and fall in love with the bastard. Fuck him, Leonard H. McCoy, and fuck his feelings and fuck his cock and fuck his tender goddamn heart.

Leonard angrily swipes at the steam that’s fogged up the mirror and stares at his reflection. Drips of water fall onto the counter, pinging as they bounce off Jim’s razor.

“That was the last time,” he says resolutely to the mirror.

If he looks fast, Leonard knows he’ll see his reflection scoffing in credible disbelief.


End file.
